Jon Morgan

Understanding the world, one idea at a time

Posts Tagged “Usability”

Often when using BPBible I needed to find the particular verse I was thinking of (exactly what search is designed for). Unfortunately, though, I didn’t always remember the exact wording of the verse, and even when I did the words I used might have been from a different version from the one I was searching. Nowadays, I’m much more likely to turn to Google to help me, since it turns out that with the help of the Internet they have solved the problem pretty well.

What I want to discuss in this post is my own personal vision: What I had already implemented in BPBible, and what my future plans were. Though it was meant to be an important part of my talk, none of it ended up covered at BibleTech.

Recently, I reflected on my experience speaking at BibleTech in 2010. The key starting point for my talk was that lots of people were doing Bible study using paper Bibles, word processors, and other general tools. Why weren’t they using our specially designed Bible software? Was there something wrong in the way we designed software? Or were our users wrong for not realising how much better our software was?

I think this mind-set illustrates a key problem with technology-led solutions. It’s very tempting as a software developer to think that if we take an existing process and replicate it exactly in software it will end up better. But what we actually find is that we were unable to replicate it exactly. Sometimes this leads to complaints, other times the system we build is just ignored.

While both Bible software and technology have changed a lot since 2010, I think the key usability principles I talked about then still apply.

Anniversaries have helped me reflect on what my religion meant to me, and today marks a significant anniversary. Seven years ago I spoke at BibleTech:2010 on “Improving User Annotations in Bible Software”. Let me tell you a little about it.